No, it comes from wanting to leverage your asset to the fullest. But that's hard to do if it's full of cruft and getting in the way of actually delivering value.
More lines of code is not equal to better. What you need is better lines of code, which usually means less of them.
Let a dev loose on a codebase and they could add value, but they could also be subtracting it. Hmm maybe developers are the liability.
One needs to keep in mind though, that minimizing a code base can have significant cost as well. (1) the cost of doing the minimization itself (2) the cost of runtime or compile time differences if any. Also one needs to keep in mind, that less code does not mean easier to maintain either.
Perhaps the amount of code is the wrong metric to optimize. Perhaps it is readability, simplicity, maintainability that we really want and those are harder to put into numbers than LOC.
More lines of code is not equal to better. What you need is better lines of code, which usually means less of them.
Let a dev loose on a codebase and they could add value, but they could also be subtracting it. Hmm maybe developers are the liability.